The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The 3GPP Release 8 introduced the LTE (Long Term Evolution) that provides core network entities for supporting real-time voice and multimedia IP services.
The self-configuration is defined as the process wherein the newly deployed e-Node Bs are configured by automatic installation procedures to get basic parameters and download necessary Software from the network.
According to the 3GPP specifications and definition of experts, in a first step, the e-Node B gets an Internet Protocol (IP) address for communicating over the network. Then the e-Node B triggers a procedure in order to be associated with an access gateway. After that, the e-Node B downloads the required software and the operational parameters and sets up its interfaces with the network. Finally, the e-Node B configures the coverage and traffic capacity according to the downloaded information, and then enters in the operational state.
With the increase of the use of e-Node Bs, there is a need for providing enhanced installation procedures in order to deploy efficiently the e-Node Bs in existing networks.